The signature difference between the Ontario Liberal budget introduced three weeks ago and the election platform released on Sunday would appear to be half a road.

That is, the $1-billion that the budget committed to constructing an access road to the Ring of Fire mineral deposit in the province’s north, which was contingent on matching federal funds, is no longer contingent on anything. But the Liberal Highway to the chromite fields, which just happens to be a big deal in Thunder Bay, where Premier Kathleen Wynne released her platform, still only has half the required funds. Would the Liberals build the rest of the road if funds from other sources can’t be found? Too soon to say.

As far as pre-election splashes go, half a road isn’t much. Nor are commitments for additional hospices and a cap on hospital parking fees, both new additions to the Liberal plan. But Ms. Wynne deserves some credit for more or less sticking to the budget as presented and defeated and not larding it up with a bunch of far-off new pledges, as the federal Conservatives did when their budget was voted down in 2011.

The Liberals probably didn’t feel terribly compelled to fiddle with their budget because so much of the narrative has changed since they introduced it. This is now an election that is showcasing two dramatically different plans: Ms. Wynne’s, which would increase spending, and PC leader Tim Hudak’s, which would aggressively cut it. (There’s also the NDP, which would mostly mimic the Liberal plan but be different by virtue of being Not Liberal.) The Premier sought to play up that stark choice on Sunday, calling the election “a referendum on Ontario’s future.”

But, on the occasion of the platform launch, which was essentially a budget relaunch, it’s worth taking a step back from the stark-choice talk and revisiting what a farce that document was in the first place.

It promises two years of deficits that will be higher than was forecast just last year, leaving Ontario about $9-billion in the red for 2015-16. Then, poof, the deficit would disappear in the two years following, with total program spending expected to be at the same level three years from now as it is today. (And interest payments on the debt to be $3-billion higher than today.)

How would the Liberals accomplish all of this high-octane deficit-fighting? The budget — and platform — does not say. Ms. Wynne and her team have adopted the mantra that spending cuts are reckless and misguided when Mr. Hudak proposes them, but it is plain as day that the Liberals would have to cut deeply years from now if they intended to make their balanced-budget target of 2017-18. There is simply no way to hold program spending level over a four-year period — well below the rate of inflation — without major cost-cutting, particularly when demographic pressures will force increases in the health budget, the most costly of ministries.

And all of that doesn’t even begin to consider what would happen in the short term when a Liberal government would negotiate the next round of contracts with the province’s public-sector unions. To the extent that the government of Dalton McGuinty accomplished anything as it tried to climb out of the post-recession deficit hole, it did so — for a couple of years, anyway — by taking an abrupt hard line with those unions, promising to force contracts upon them in a move that probably did more to hasten the end of his political career than anything to do with gas plants. Ms. Wynne has explicitly eschewed such tactics, but also insists there is no new money available for wage increases beyond existing ministry budgets. How, exactly, does she imagine zero-increase contracts will be signed? By asking nicely?

The Premier is welcome, of course, to accuse Mr. Hudak of planning to do too much too fast in his fervour to return the province to balance. But Mr. McGuinty once believed that eliminating the deficit was the province’s top priority. It pretty much cost him his job.

Ms. Wynne’s is a plan that leaves the difficult decisions for another day, and puts deficit-fighting well down the list of priorities. It was true when the budget was unveiled, and it’s true now. The Premier does the province a disservice when she pretends otherwise.

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